Java and any kernel post 1063_FC4

[Wes Shull]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:16:29 +0000, Paul <paul at all-the-johnsons.co.uk> wrote:
> For some odd reason, using Azureus seems to kill my machine with
> annoying frequency (either hangs it or resets it). Now, I'm not sure if
> this is a Java problem, an Azureus problem (Azureus is a java bittorrent
> client) or a kernel problem.
> 
> Anyone else seeing this or is it just me?

Yes, I have, using Azureus under Sun 1.5.0 (and now _01).  Lockups
(usually so hard I can't alt-sysrq-b), and sometimes spontaneous
reboots.  I also can't get through more than a couple eps of Buffy in
mplayer without lockage, and running folding at home overnight seems to
do the trick too.

I've tried backing off to the 741 kernel (FC3), and while that's
better, it's still not crash-free.  Unfortunately, my hardware has a
bad history, and I'm still in the process of making sure it's not at
fault before I bugzilla anything.  I had a power supply die last year,
which may have been the reason my GeForce 256 died somewhat later... 
I'm now running on a borrowed Permedia 2V card, the health of which
the lender wasn't entirely sure of either.  I'm planning on picking up
a cheapie GF4MX card today to see if that helps things.

If you haven't already, definitely give your hardware at least an
overnight run of memtest86+.    I found that with my bios set to
'turbo', the memory timings were just a little too aggressive such
that I was getting a few sporadic errors on test 6 in high memory.  An
initial 1-pass run I had done when I first enabled the setting hadn't
exposed that problem.  Setting it back to 'normal' fixed the memory
errors, but unfortunately hasn't ended the crashes.

Of course, it's all moot right now because I have yet to get a single
oops or panic message to report...

Other than the video cards, my hardware is an Athlon 1700+ (1466 MHz)
on a Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus mobo (VIA KT266A), plus an extra ethernet
card (tulip), SCSI (2940UW), and an extra Promise 100TX controller. 
Lots of drives.  Any similarities to your hardware?

I run with vm.swappiness set to 0, but I'm not sure if that has any
bearing on the problem.

--wes